Research as an Intense and Inconvenient Gift: Participatory Youth Research and the Co-Productive Imagination

Abstract

The article presents the research as a gift and an invitation to expand our imaginations as to how we are moved and seek to move others through research co-production. Thinking with the research as gift is made possible through a dialogue between Whitehead’s process philosophy (actual entities, societies, intensity, and attention) and Lauren Berlant’s queer and affect theory (inconvenience, friction, and attention). Research as gift is an intense, inconvenient, and attentional research practice. It is a practice that can be complex and fraught, yet this is what makes it so generative. The article demonstrates how a carousel of creative methods and organizational arrangements with sufficient expertise and capacity enable young people to co-produce research through eventful and expansive adventures following gift intensities and achieving life-affirming encounters for those inquiring in a world in process.

This article re-imagines research co-production through encounters with the gift. I discovered the generative potential of the gift during a project to design practices for youth self-organization. The Design Research Get Lost (DRGL) project presented a group of young people with seven rules (e.g., your parents’ must agree to your plan) and a budget of £5,000 to self-organize something, anything, within 3 months. Crucially, no one—academic, practitioner nor parent—would help them. This decision responded to a critique of the contrived participation in participatory and co-produced research where something productive is nearly always created. Academics and practitioners are incentivised to step into participatory processes to ensure, for example, the photographs are taken and the exhibition happens. In the DRGL, they would either organize something or they would be left to fail, which is what happened. They or the process at least failed. The problem was that three young people, from the original nine, refused to accept the opportunity had concluded. They kept visiting the building where I worked asking for meetings. What to do?

I experienced the failure of the process to co-produce youth self-organization as an implosion of the diverse motivations, ethical and conceptual orientations, and institutional scaffolding that cohered the research. For example, the failure to design conditions for youth self-organization disconnected the inquiry from the literatures on participatory design and co-design (Björgvinsso et al., 2012) and social innovation (Manzini, 2014). Projects hold research together; but the deadline had passed, my budgeted time for the project was spent. My moral, ethical belief that it was worth risking the youth participants’ deflation by offering them a genuine opportunity to self-organize, to succeed or fail by their effort alone, so research practice might move beyond cynical forms of contrived or tokenistic participation was shaken (Duggan et al., 2024).

I searched local community spaces for inspiration. I met the manager of a community garden center in Manchester, UK. Seventeen years previously, she found a book on a bus in San Francisco, USA. Reading the book transformed her life. That coming week she would travel 5,221 miles to place the book on a bus for someone else, a complete stranger, to find and read. This was eventful. That an encounter could have such a monumental impact on someone’s life, and they would feel a powerful obligation to pass this on, to gift it to someone else, after such a long time, and at such distance and cost, was profoundly moving. Immediately I understood the youth self-organization project I was co-producing, that sought to subvert discourses and practices of entrepreneurial youth subjectivities by building youth capacities for autonomous organization, as a mean and petty contrivance compared with this life affirming connection with the gift.

This writing proposes process philosophy as a crucial practice resource for collaborative inquiry through encounters with the gift. This develops through a section on the gift, followed by three flights or speculative propositions: Feeling for gift intensities, attending to the inconvenience, and, moving through a carousel of methods. These flights invite researchers to attend to gift intensities and inconvenience while embedding the inquiry in organizational contexts with the capacity to enable open and expansive adventures that connect young people with eventful gift experiences.

The Gift Feels

Maus’s (2001) seminal essay The Gift describes an institutionalizing threefold obligation to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. Different disciplinary and theoretical approaches have used the gift to re-imagine objects, values, relationships, society, economy, and more. Presenting a novel process philosophical account requires working across the diverse scholarship, attending to specific disciplinary and political contexts and commitments (Graeber, 2014). For example, research often reads across modern or indigenous and pre-modern contexts in pursuit of alternatives to market-based societies (Graeber, 2001). Nevertheless, we can agree some core features: The gift is not free (Douglas, 2002), disinterested or without obligation (Maus, 2001). Gifts cannot be mandatory or obliged by contract or funding, as public services and research are (Godbout & Caillé, 1998). Gifts are given and received when establishing or augmenting a social relationship is more important than the exchange or value of the goods or service in question (Graeber, 2001). The gift has a marginal presence in education and research, as a form of Nietzschean pedagogy (Corriero, 2023), resisting commodification in education (Saltman, 2010), and the ethos or practice of a radical academic (Graeber, 2004). There are also a series of gift aligned practices, such as pedagogy as gift (Allan, 2008) and research as ceremony (Wilson, 2008).

Reading Whitehead’s process philosophy with the work of Berlant enables me to propose an intense and inconvenient gift in relation to which we can attend to orientate the research we co-produce. Whitehead and Berlant are an unlikely and frictious couple for a productive dialogue on the gift. Berlant (1957–2021) wrote with queer, affect, literary, cultural, and critical theory. Their work traversed intimate lives and sex, the fantasies that motivate our lives, and styles of living in hazardous and precarious contexts (Berlant, 2011). Berlant’s writing was funny, personal, political, and gritty; seeking out the cracks and crevices in the material and affective relations of late capitalism (e.g., Berlant, 2017). Whereas, Whitehead (1861–1947) was a mathematician, philosopher, and logician whose magisterial Process and Reality (Whitehead, 1978) develops through a dense, technical, and abstract scheme. Neither wrote about nor, as far as I know, inspired writing on the gift. Yet their profound and distinct engagement with relationality and ideas of attention as it creates the conditions for new feelings and formations, offer a productive re-imagining of both the gift and co-produced research as gift.

In this imaginative leap through attending to the gift in co-produced research, I combine two practices from Whitehead: the proposition and progressing through working hypotheses. The writing develops through a non-traditional format, articulating and encountering three propositions, as an adventure of thought and feeling: one, feeling for gift intensities; two, attending to the inconvenience; three, moving through a carousel of methods. These propositions provide a, “lure for feeling” the world in different and interesting ways (Whitehead, 1978, p. 86). They are an opportunity to work with and attune to extant potentials, creating new feelings for sorting and connections in a world in process. To begin the adventure, Whitehead (1978, p. 5) proposes we board an airplane,

It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

Imaginative generalization developed by taking ideas with specific applications (e.g., physics) and applying them in different contexts, thereby generalizing them. Humbler in ambition, this inquiry connects the idea of the gift from philosophy, anthropology, and sociology into dialogue with participatory and co-produced research practice through Whitehead’s cosmological scheme. Whitehead (1978) presents a series of success criteria for judgment among the rhythms of proposition and the rational appraisal of what has changed: including, coherence and logical perfection. Ultimately, “[t]he proper test is not one of finality, but of progress” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 14).

One way to guide this progression, moving from expressions in everyday and specialist sciences through speculative philosophy is developing a “working hypothesis,”

[T]o coordinate the current expressions of human experience in common speech, in social institutions, in actions, in the principles of special sciences, elucidating harmony and exposing discrepancies. (Whitehead, 1967, p. 222)

Working within a process philosophy approach, attempting this coordination and re-formulation of the “social institutions” of the spaces for participatory inquiry. A concern in this writing is navigating the tensions between following propositions and the attention to, for example, affect and intensities while thinking how these might relate, disrupt or inform working hypothesis both as inspiring new propositions for inquiry and infrastructures and practices for research co-production.

Flights Beyond Co-Production

DRGL began during a research council “sandpit,” which are “intensive discussion forums where free thinking is encouraged to delve into the problems on the agenda to uncover innovative solutions” (UKRI, 2025, n.p.). The event brought together academics, funders and practitioners to redesign participation through “risky” research that would “give power back to citizens.” Although measures were taken to make it friendly and inclusive, the necessity of self-organizing into competitive teams that secure funding means sandpits can be critiqued for the neoliberalising biases reproducing individualizing, entrepreneurial subjectivities reproducing inequalities around class and gender, and so on. I attended as a precariously employed early career researcher, after being told that I had to bring in funding to secure a permanent contract.

The event was interdisciplinary but located in design, which was outside my education and comfort, so I accepted this an opportunity to re-interpret my ongoing concerns around tokenism, extractive relationships in institutionalizing research with young people and communities. In a sense, it did not matter what specific term and practice I chose, as similar critiques have been advanced against participatory research, design, and co-production. For those engaging with such ideas with anything beyond technocratic purposes, a crucial question is navigating the apparent benefits of, for example, co-production as a buzzword (Durose et al., 2022) that aligns policy makers, funders, researchers, and practice with the possibility of successfully positioning one’s inquiry “within, against, and beyond” the neoliberalising university (Bell & Pahl, 2018, p. 105). Given the connections with neoliberalising austerity (Habermehl & Perry, 2021) and the constraints imposed on research co-production due to being anchored in the neoliberalising university (Duggan, 2024); there is a risk that critical and social justice enactments of research co-production continue to revisit Lorde’s (1981) dictum, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” one project at a time.

My approach in the DRGL was to attempt to navigate these tensions through a tactic of immanent critique. Following Deleuze and Guattari, for Manning and Massumi (2014, p. 87), “The strategy of immanent critique is to inhabit one’s complicity and make it turn—in the sense in which butter ‘turns’ to curd.” I was not sure if butter or curd is preferable, but I felt I needed to develop a project to buy ingredients to eat. Inhabiting my complicity was a source of ongoing anxiety yet navigating this uncertainty proved generative. Through the sandpit’s processes of inspiration, dialogue, feedback, and iterative development; I articulated a critique of contrived youth participation and/or co-production, where performative and neoliberalising academic pressures result in academic projects pretty much always producing something, perhaps suspiciously so. Although there is a minor literature describing disappointment and failure in participatory projects (Duggan et al., 2024), I wondered whether the adults—academics or practitioners—tend to take over the process to ensure the outcome is successful. Taking advantage of call’s permission to undertake risky research, I sought to foreclose the risks of co-production by designing a form of youth self-organization toward autonomous organization. My “good-bad” idea of this imminent critique, was to design a series of rules or “enabling constraints” for youth self-organization (Massumi, 2017, p. 137). I would invite a group of young people (ages 12–15 years) with experience in youth cultures of DIY, democracy, and self-organization (the Woodcraft Folk and youth coders) into the project space. Crucially, they would be allowed to succeed or fail by themselves. No adult—parents, researchers, practitioners—would intervene, except reminding them of the rules and ensuring safety. I hoped to create a project space, a bubble, protected from the demands of academic research to succeed, produce impactful outcomes.

The project ran for 3 months with 9 young people taking part. When the deadline passed and nothing was self-organized, the project ought to have concluded but did not. However, three of the group asked for meetings, seeking a way forward. We agreed another deadline with the funder. This included modest changes, such as two adult mentors to meet with the young people to support them with specific challenges (e.g., how to design a game). When it became clear the outcome would repeat, I questioned the project’s ethics and politics, and myself. The project imploded. The two remaining young people seemed trapped with the responsibility of this unusual opportunity, neither wanting to leave the project nor fail to self-organize something.

The article now turns to the flights through which I sought to re-ground my research beyond the constraints of the language and practices of terms like co-production through connections with the gift.

Flight One: Feeling for Gift Intensities

When the DRGL project imploded, I experienced a series of emotions—doubt, shame, regret, relief—and a brooding sense of the injustice I had imparted, a transfer to young people withheld. My risky and inventive idea in my immanent critique of participatory research practice to remove the pressures and power structures of neoliberalising academia for research to succeed and create impact (Kennelly, 2018) had instead created a contractually and temporally bound space absent the care, advice, and curiosity of adults. The project was primarily interested in whether a predefined outcome—even if it was self-organizing anything according to seven open rules—was successfully achieved or not. Rather than critiquing youth encounters with the vagaries of neoliberalising rationalities and practices —transitory and contractually defined relationships, a concern with outcomes, entrepreneurialism—from a comfortable distance. I was culpable in reproducing them. I had failed the young people. I would somehow make amends.

I traveled around Manchester seeking inspiration. As described earlier, I spoke to the manager of a community garden center. Seventeen years previously, a book she found on a bus transformed her life. She was flying 5,221 miles (8,402 km), from Manchester to San Francisco to leave the book on a bus for someone else, a complete stranger, to find and read. This encounter with such a powerful and productive gift encounter was embarrassing and inspirational.

Whitehead’s cosmological scheme helped make sense of these stirrings of the gift. Although I understood how the book could be a gift, how might I mobilize the gift in the research was not obvious. Where a material given object—the book—establishes familiar normativities, rituals, rhythms, and values. This was an immaterial, intangible encounter that I was interpreting and enacting. There are, of course, the institutional and reciprocal giving of gifts for birthdays, in recognition and in esteem. But then we may also describe a child’s smile, another day with an elderly parent, a beautiful sunrise or life itself as a gift.

Whitehead (1978, p. 5) teaches us to engage with everyday language and ideas as “storehouses” of human knowledge and experience, which allows considerable latitude in thinking with diverse arrangements that might be described as a gift. Following the process philosophy method, we address the limitations of the store houses of knowledge. For example, mediating the biases of an excess of subject-predicate thinking disrupts the usual concerns over the agency of individuals in folk and scholarly ideas around gifts (e.g., “I give . . .” and “you receive the gift”).

Whitehead’s non-anthropocentric process philosophy decentres the human in the gift relationship. Actual entities or actual occasions are the primary form of experience. Rather than we humans, actual entities feel or “prehend” and are felt or “prehended” through “prehensive exchange[s] of affective data” (Rousell, 2017, p. 16). Strikingly, everything that has ever happened, every gift given and received or refused exist objectively as actualities or potentials like a body of water where each drop is an atomistic experience existing as an infinite objective, disjunctive potential for future events (Whitehead, 1978). It is this diversity that represents the potential and possibility for new things—new feelings, new gifts—to emerge through eventful realization (Massumi, 2011; Whitehead, 1978). Events are pulsing and overlapping waves of creation, novelty, and invention where diversity becomes singularity and the emergence of a new drop of experience, or actual entity. Actual entities are onto-genetic to experience, meaning they define the world’s becoming and bringing into being (Massumi, 2011). Although these atomistic processes shape, feed, or fail to provide the potential for the becoming and being of gifts, humans do not experience them directly. At a certain scale, these onto-genetic processes of becoming became experiential and noticed by me: This feels like a gift.

As gifts are experienced and everything that has experience or is experienced is a society (Debaise, 2017), we must speak of a gift society. Societies are, “a cluster a collection, or, more exactly a togetherness of actual entities. A society is nothing but a relation that makes something that matters from certain aspects of . . . actual entities” (Debaise, 2017). There are a number of ways Whitehead describes the things and their characteristics that are experience(d): society and social nexus, public and private. To simplify things a little, I emphasize instead that process by which “the system of transmission of relations, inheritances and repetitions” (Debaise, 2017, p. 129) is processual to the gift society as it develops through a succession of genetic relations or inheritances along a historic route (Debaise, 2017). Along these historic routes, Whitehead’s process philosophy provides an inventive reading of how gift intensities begin, connect and are felt. Contrary to any anthropocentric or hubristic account wherein I had convoked the gift, via Whitehead the origin of the gift would have been the idea an actual entity had of its future self, or, “the felt lure of subjective aim which in fact gets the whole process of concrescence started . . .” (Jones, 1998/1999, p. 22).

Of course, this language sounds abstract, but it illuminates connections across the events of my life, when I received gifts or experiences that were ambiguous but meaningful. On a rare sunny day, my primary school teacher would take us out of lessons to play rounders on the field. It is a stirring memory, a gift, to be taught by a teacher that play, transgression and joy were to be valued. This formative event created the potentials that through my life have selected and sorted with other subjects; the eventful pulling forwards to being open and receptive, active and attending to sharing in, with and through the gift societies.

I realized I would have to break the project and its petty critique of contrived participation. I began circulating—cycling—through local communities, attending and selecting to intensities and potentials. I quickly created a plan. I explained it to one of the young people as we walked from the university to the garden center one evening. As I finished explaining the plan, I asked her if it was okay. She stepped up onto a curb separating a pavement and lawn. She smiled broadly and exhaled. Her shoulders relaxing a little it seemed, relieved of the burden of this money and this thing they could not do. “Yes,” she said. This release, an amplification of the circulating potentials, powerfully connecting with the stirrings of the gift.

Contrary to the project’s critique of contrived participation, I organized the event. I contrived the participation, ensuring something productive happened. The remaining two young people turned up, each with a parent, to a community festival at the garden center. We bought £2,500 worth of books from Waterstone’s Books for Syria scheme that match-funded any money spent on books as humanitarian aid to refugees. We gifted the books to people that completed an ActionBound.com app-based treasure hunt around the neighborhood. We converted a shed into a community library, housing the remaining books. Each book was added to BookCrossings.com, which shares the gifting of books online.

There were games, music, apple bobbing, conviviality, and abundance. At times, the young people stayed by the shed, running a human fruit machine paying out the books as prizes. Then they disappeared into the crowd, visiting the music tent, apple bobbing, or various art and craft stands. They organized a voting process to decide how to spend the remaining budget. The winning idea was to build a pizza oven at the garden center. Then they were off again. At the end of the day, they came back. I asked one, “So, we did it. How do you feel?” She smiled self-consciously, and muttered, “Good.” And, just like that, the young people were no longer trapped. The gift was given. The project could end. Release.

Attending to gift intensities is a productive orientation for inquiry. The next flight proposes developing a working hypothesis for research as gift, connecting with facilitative institutions and practices.

Flight Two: Attending to the Inconvenience

This flight follows the proposition of the gift as an adaptive infrastructure for navigating our encounters with optimism and inconvenience in a world in process. This begins in an alternative reading of the DRGL project. In pursuit of practices for youth self-organization, the project’s rules created boundaries that prevented collaboration between the young people and adults. Participation was reduced to a binary outcome, success or failure. Relationships were frictionless, convenient, and asocial. The inconvenience returned, however, as I observed the young people’s confusion and resistance to failing. The intensity of the gift moved me to break and the rules and re-organize the project, but the gift was also a way through the inconvenience the project had become.

Co-producing research with non-academics is profoundly inconvenient, at least compared to other modes of research (e.g., interviews, focus groups). It involves navigating university bureaucracies not designed to work in informal community contexts and working with young people experiencing diverse forms of marginalization, trauma, poverty, and mental health issues. Inconvenience, however, is not merely “the negative sandpaper of sociality” (Berlant, 2022, p. 8) or indeed the inefficiency of participatory research in relation to other approaches more suited to the performative metrics for research production (e.g., questionnaires). Inconvenience and friction are fundamental to knowing ourselves, others, and the world (Berlant, 2022, p. 7).

For Berlant (2011), people are optimistically attached to objects, fantasies, and visions of the good life. These attachments are optimistic, even if they are not necessarily positive or good, and indeed they can be harmful or cruel. The processes of attaching and feeling are an ongoing labor, creating pressures, where

Attachment, one might say, is what draws you out into the world; inconvenience is the adjustment from taking things in . . . a drive to keep taking in and living with objects. The inconvenience drive generates a pressure that is hard to manage, let alone bear. (Berlant, 2022, p. 6)

Beyond Whitehead’s subtle abstractions, Berlant accounts for the complex affective relations of living among other people, objects, animals, scenes, and the diverse sensorium of sounds, sights, feelings, and so on to which we must deal and adjust. Inconvenience is, therefore, an essential part of life, of knowing, and of being known. It is, “the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation” (Berlant, 2022, p. 2). The pressures of which can be overwhelming, as evidenced in unguarded encounters with the world,

Insofar as we are affected—by the world, by people, by language, by things—we are disorganized; insofar as we take in the impact of encounters with the world, we wobble, surprised, ceaselessly adjusting; insofar as we are members of disrespected populations, this constant process is at once invigorating and exhausting . . . (Berlant, 2022, p. 38)

There are many ways of mediating and managing the work of being in the world. Among which we can attend to the sources of friction and inconvenience in our life, renounce the fantasy of the liberal individual, and live in-and-through forms of non-sovereign relationality (Berlant, 2022). Non-sovereign relationality, “assumes that there is no sovereignty outside of relationships, and that we are always in a loosely woven state of becoming” (Berlant, 2019, n.p.). For those of us that live among the societal and infrastructural wreckage of late capitalism, we must create adaptations and build infrastructures, that “is to focus on the generation of forms of life that broadly bind and extend relationality” and focus “on [the] many phases of the activity of poeisis, or world-making” (Berlant, 2022, p. 20).

We can think of gifts as inventive adaptations and infrastructures for managing and mediating the labor, friction and inconvenience of living in a profoundly relational world. This world is populated by objects, people, and scenes to which we are optimistically attached but impose considerable labors and fraught risks. In Berlant, attention plays a crucial role in encountering and adjusting to the inconvenience and affective relations of a world that must be dealt with (Berlant, 2022, p. 14). As the advert, “say it with flowers” captures: A simple gift can perform diverse functions (e.g., welcome, goodbye, happy birthday, I outlived you) and communicate subtle messages (e.g., I love you, I cheated on you, these are expensive). Concluding the project became an event enabling us all to move on. The young people avoided failing. I was not an unethical researcher, a bad person.

If I was navigating this attentional infrastructure of gift connections, was anyone else paying attention? It appears the reorganized project performed gift relations, but seemingly not in a way that establishing enduring values, norms, rhythms and rituals. We gifted 204 books, but none were registered on Bookscrossing.com. The shed we repurposed as a community library was knocked down after 2 months. The remaining books were moved to a shelf in a green house. The garden center’s newsletter credited the pizza oven we funded to a local company. Of the two young people at the end, as we said our goodbyes, one asked the other for their online i, seemingly with romantic intentions. Although these focused on multiple and diverse forms of contribution, exchange, and gift; these were not what I had in mind.

Of course, I did not instruct the young people to “pass it on” or “pay it forward” or give them any obligation to my putative gift to them. As Godbout and Caillé (1998, pp. 4–5) write,

The world of the gift is one where the implicit and the unsaid reign supreme. The magic of the gift can only operate as long as the underlying rules are not formulated. As soon as they become explicit the carriage turns into a pumpkin. . . the gift is reduced to reciprocity.

In a sense, it was not that kind of gift. My teacher did not let us skip maths to play rounders, so we would do the exact same if we became primary school teachers.

Thinking with Whitehead’s societies help make sense of these transient gifts. As a gift society develops, it becomes its own purpose feeling, connecting, and joining or separating with potential component parts organizes around a particular intensity of feeling (Debaise, 2017). As we understand the gift society as a site of constant dynamic changes, through the exchange of members and modulations in the intensities of feeling, a chief concern is the maintenance and continuation of the society—this intensity—or its dissipation and dissolution. Another way to understand this in terms of a society’s degrees of openness or closure, “Every society must continually ‘solve’ or negotiate its degree of openness” (Duvernoy, 2021, p. 117). In a basic sense, we can think of a rock as a closed society and humans as open societies, or degrees of closure or openness in terms of the miser that refuses to give or receive gifts or not, and the research design without the space for participant agency to re-interpret, re-orientate and co-produce the process or not. With a refusal to risk unsettling encounters with the other, and the integrations with contrasting potentials, closed societies are less likely to feel greater intensities of experience. The more open the society the likelier that greater intensities of experience can be achieved, but with greater risks of dissipation and dissolution.

It was the openness of the project society, in part an affordance of the small-scale funding committed to risky research, that allowed the breaking of the rules and the integration of diverse and contrasting experiences. The intensity of the encounter with the book-gift return to San Francisco joining with intense and eventful memories and potentials—the teacher taking us out of lessons to play rounders in the sun—created a series of capacious and mischievous permissions, inspirations, and obligations. We can think of gift societies as deepening and intensifying emotional experiences through the creative advance, “an intensive, qualitative, and aesthetic drive for ‘depth of satisfaction’” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 70). But as Whitehead (1978, p. 102) warns, which we can read with as a risk of the gift as “a creative response: may be unfortunate or inadequate . . . [or even amount to] persistent failure.”

The gift offers a powerful and generative set of orientations for research while also being potentially disruptive and fleeting in impact. The next flight proposes embedding gift inquiries in organizational arrangements.

Flight Three: Moving Through a Carousel of Methods

These encounters with the gift, nearly a decade ago, enriched my practice, becoming what I call the co-productive imagination. Informed by process philosophy and speculative practice, the co-productive imagination seeks to collaboratively develop and encounter propositions that arrange new ideas, bodies, affects, and materials in artful encounters to achieve events in a world in process (Duggan, 2021). This careful and imaginative work is orientated toward, “developing our capacities to attune to the potentials that emerge and determine whether what we research Matters!” (Duggan, 2021, p. 358; Stengers, 2019). Although research co-production can be empowering and democratizing or work toward social justice (Banks et al., 2018), its anchoring in funding and higher education contexts means research co-production is, “particularly reliant on the authority of those above, beyond and without the research encounter to begin, be valued, and continue” (Duggan, 2024, p. 292). The challenge is nurturing the achieved potentials beyond the diverse forms of control and capture at work at the intersections of academic inquiry, the media, politics, and so on; we must therefore re-imagine and transform the contexts of our research practice while we develop ethical and generative research with young people.

Practicing research in relation to the intensity of the gift helps creates a shared orientation for academics and non-academics to attune to, nurture, and amplify what matters in a world in process. Co-producing research commits to encounters between academics and non-academics with multiple possible orientations for unsettling and reforming the practice, expertise, knowledge, research, and so on. In my experience, it is not difficult to teach non-academics to do conventional research tasks. The challenge is encouraging the non-expert to feel confident enough to follow some rules and break others, adapt practices and do the unusual or unexpected, which creates vital and generative research. There is a risk, for example, that potentially lively processes of inquiry are obscured, equated with conducting research methods in the same way that thematic data analysis or coding can replace a close and thoughtful engagement with data (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). It is much harder to work with young people to develop their confidence and academic sensibility to judge whether this feeling or that idea matters? Attuning to what matters is the becoming potential of the gift event, a potentiality to which everyone can access and attend.

Therefore, one of the dynamics of research as gift is the need for openness to allow for the attentional practice of following the singular achievements of eventful processes, which I have operationalized through the process of a carousel of moving methods. The carousel is, “an iterative and expansive series of techniques of relation to engage the youth co-researchers through encounters and conversations that matter” (Duggan, 2021, p. 359). The open arrangement typically develops week on week, with a focus decided at the beginning of each session which might be nurtured and sustained or left to wane. This work is informed by youth work as a method (Batsleer & Duggan, 2020), embedded in youth work practices of voluntary association, listening and responsiveness, hanging around and building trust, with commitments to Freirean (1972) social action to engage with oppression.

As a brief example of this attentional gift practice, during a co-produced project on loneliness and mental wellbeing during COVID-19 (Duggan, 2022). The project developed in partnership with 42^nd Street, a youth mental health organization that prioritizes youth work, group work, creativity and art. The research developed through a series of weekly meetings and ad hoc physically distanced meetings in an art gallery. After months of hanging out, talking, and listening, during a physical meeting, Jolene (a pseudonym) entered the room and announced, “I’m angry! I want to break things!” Rod, the art lead, responded, “You want to break things? Great! Let’s do some action art.” Action art or action painting develops through the embodied and physical encounters with the material, the paint, and canvas as associated with artists such as Jackson Pollock or Ushio Shinohara.

A session was planned, Jolene joined two other young women, an older artist and a youth participant. All three had experienced bullying, misogyny and homophobia. They covered the walls of a room in the gallery with white paper, placed an old drum set in the middle. They wrote all the hurtful names they had been called on the walls: slut, fat, slag, weirdo, dumb, disgusting, mustache man. Then there was an explosion of throwing, punching, and splattering paint across the room. Jolene describes her experience,

I had experience of bullying at school. I think it was helpful for the young[er] person to hear my experiences. I didn’t really fit in. I felt really weird, but that weirdness has helped me find my people, and I’m really happy with who I am. Hopefully that’s been really useful for them to hear. Making the action art room was really cathartic. Any ideas we came up with, were encouraged. Let’s line the walls with paper and throw paint around! Yes! It was really nice, as an artist, to be given that permission by a gallery. I wish it was something that was more accessible and easier to do, and especially as we all identify as women; that kind of expression of emotions through a very physical manner isn’t encouraged, and it was a great opportunity for it to be encouraged. It has a wonderful legacy of physicality, creativity, expression! It was inspiring to me and it is something that I’d love to do again.

In this context of gifts and giving, it is significant that Jolene wanted to share the opportunity to participate in action art to other young people. She created an action art journal for young people to use at home. The guide explains how to identify emotions and then use action art practices such as writing words on paper and then destroying the paper as creatively as possible (e.g., tear, soak, rip, scrunch, cover in wax, and heat). It was distributed online and through youth work networks during the COVID-19 “lockdown” and beyond. In a sense, an encounter with action art was passed on or gifted to others.

The carousel of moving methods, located in an organization with the expertise and capacity to work with vulnerable people safely, enables research to progress through the identification and connection of feelings, affects, desires, and trauma with eventful encounters as a form of inquiry that combines therapy, art, and inquiry. These can be collectively undertaken as a group, connected with others in similar situations or individual. The aim is to create an experience so rich and intense that it can build, connect, and sustain an abundance of gift intensities that will hopefully endure for a lifetime and beyond.

Conclusion

There is no single form of co-production, but there are common emphases that knowledge, transformation, policy, and practice changes are produced collaboratively. This productive orientation indicates the neoliberalising ideological imperative to instrumentalize knowledge production as socially and economically utility (Brown, 2011), identifiable in the research-society “relevance gap” that formed the basis for the research co-production agenda (Durose et al., 2012). As co-production is predominantly anchored in the modern, neoliberalising university, these productive orientations are augmented and rationalized through incentives for world class, impactful research and the diverse technologies and practices for translating research into outcomes. Co-production’s success is in part providing a passcode, perhaps a shibboleth, for navigating and aligning the diverse scales and agendas of policy, funder’s disciplines and fields of study, academics practice, and specific projects. Nevertheless, it often leads to well-meaning encounters with young people when, for example, power is to be transferred with limited time and resources as indexed through research activities, outputs, and outcomes. As the DRGL developed and imploded, the immanent critique tactic of attempting to disconnect the young people’s encounters with each other from the pressures to produce something by making the project ambivalent of the outcome failed, as the process remained within the shadow of the logics and rationalities the project sought to critique.

It is perhaps unsurprising that after the project imploded, I found the gift. The gift is described as a primary form of sociality on which other relationships are based (Godbout & Caillé, 1998). Research often requires us to navigate a series of institutional, policy, and disciplinary landscapes appropriating and rearticulating ideas and concepts—design, participation, co-production—before we do something as simple as seeking to inquire collaboratively with young people. After the implosion of the DRGL, the institutionalizing discourse fell away, the gift presented as a golden thread to traverse the diverse intersections of the processes of research co-production. It is an approach in search of intense, meaningful encounters, or more precisely, it recognizes that societies of intense, meaningful encounters are searching for connections, amplifications as we live and inquire in a world in process. It invites us to delve into our individual and collective experiential archives and diverse circulating potentials to take an imaginative leap with our research, in search of events. We can attend to extant potentials, but I have found it is generative to think and feel with encounters of inconvenience, “the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation” (Berlant, 2022, p. 2), an essential part of life, of knowing people, and of being known. In my practice, I seek to embed these encounters with young people through a carousel of moving methods in a youth work organization to connect with the capacities for open and expansive adventures with gift potentials and achievements. I believe this approach has the potential to contribute to both scholarship on the gift and participatory and/or co-produced research.

This speculative and processual dialogue on the research as gift might re-imagine ideas of the gift. Where the clarity of a material given object—a book or pipe, for example—establishes familiar normativities, rituals, rhythms, and values using existing theories and approaches. The inspiration of the book gift and the re-organization of the project were immaterial, intangible encounters I was interpreting and enacting. Elder-Vass (2015) identifies positional gift relationships, wherein young people experience gifts from older people and then as they achieve a senior position, they follow the normative obligation to provide gifts to those junior to them. This explained what I was experiencing, but it located the gift obligations in a series of diverse yet unnamed normative forces. I thought deconstructionist and post-structural theory would be useful, but it was dominated by concerns with the debt or poison that the gift engenders an obligation to reciprocate or return the gift thus nullifying the gift (Maus, 2001; Moore, 2011), or emphasizing the impossibility of the gift (no givee, no giver, no object given) (Derrida, 1992). Yet, following Shaviro (2009), we can say process philosophy is less concerned with how the gift is possible but how there are always new gifts and giving and understanding these conditions, flows, and intensities.

However, can we think of gifts as intensities of feelings? Connecting my encounter with the young person on the project feeling relieved that they were not going to fail with the teacher taking my class to play rounders some 35 years ago obviously demands the reader’s good will. Perhaps I was merely relieved I had made amends and the young people were no longer sad. Maybe leaving them with the encounter of failure would have been more character-building experience for them. All I can point to is the eventful feeling. Gift scholarship is conflicted on the correct level of analysis but if the gift is possible or impossible, usually we can point to the exchange of an object, time or resources between parties. I suggest the gift is an intensity of feeling that is achieved or not, if so, it is a gift, if not, it is not, which is circular reasoning. Circularity in argument is typically understood as fallacy. But what is the gift if not circular? We are all too aware when an exchange is not a gift achievement, whether it is compelled or resented or thoughtless. In contrast to previous theories that seek to deconstruct the gift (e.g., Derrida, 1992), Whitehead’s constructive orientation (Stengers, 2019) moves toward the agreement of self-evidence (Whitehead, 1967, p. 49), attending to the conditions, processes, and events; moving with the appetitive drive to re-apply the scheme in different and divergent contexts. I plan to undertake this work as my research practice develops.

There are productive yet troubling dynamics to practicing research as gift. Co-produced and participatory research is often committed to achieving social justice, empowerment, democracy, and transformation (Facer & Enright, 2016), in relation to which research as a gift might seem trivial and indulgent. Where practice is orientated toward achieving equality in research relationships (Albert et al., 2023), although not absolute and culturally contingent, gifts can organize around hierarchy, and thus potentially reproduce inequality. Where, for example, existing hierarchical modes of research seek to fix problems (Stiegler, 2024), the giving of gifts might be merely tokenistic, not even a sticking plaster on the exigent social, economic and environmental issues young people face. Paying youth and community participants is increasingly seen as ethical practice, recognizing their expertise and contribution (Tisdall et al., 2025), which is ever more relevant in contexts of austerity and youth hardship and poverty. A gift is often a symbolically but not materially valuable object or experience, as such it would not remove financial barriers to marginalized young people taking part in research and might be seen as patronizing, where adults get paid and young people receive gifts. There is an ethical risk that the researcher or young people become the individual, personal, biographical resources and potentials for gift events. Given the profound pressures and forces active in higher education relating to performative and competitive pressures and subjectivities, any optimistic attachments to a fantasy of research as gift might become exploitative and institutionally co-opted, risking encounters with cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011). The gift might become another set of affirmative commitments, like social justice and democracy, that create the conditions for self-exploitation and/or institutional co-optation (Papoulias & Callard, 2022). It is because the gift can be so fraught that the attentional practices and relational capacities to navigate these issues productively means that research as gift can be so generative.

It is the continual movement, the puzzling at ideas, affects and events but also the discursive pressures for self, entrepreneurialism and success that is a useful and foundational orientation in research. Whitehead presents a fraught relationship with ideas and concepts that we cannot think without yet are “not a human creation . . . [but] powerful and demanding ‘other-than-humans’” (Stengers, 2019, p. 14). In the abstraction and naming of a particular set of activities and arrangements as a gift, we must continue to attend to our abstractions (Stengers, 2023). Our language and words are imprecise, as the nuances and troubles of understanding what is a gift and might be a gift demonstrates. This is why Stengers and Savransky (2018, p. 136) read through Whitehead the necessity of an art of paying attention, as, “life itself lurks in the interstices of our reasons. . . It is just creating the occasion—a rather Quaker art, to ‘bethink,’ to pay attention to what may lurk.” This is a wonderful insight into the doing of inquiry. A gift.

Through these attentional practices, we can continue to wonder, to puzzle, and attend to the young people we are working with, experimenting at the potentials of what is possible, in recognition of the risk of failure and disintegration of the creative response. Somewhere, within, between, or beyond us is the potential for a gift to make its way and rearrange worlds in its wake. We must recognize how distinct and divergent the language, values, and rhythms of the gift are to the activities, outputs, and outcomes on the typical wish list expected of research co-production projects.